The Ecosystem of Creative Practice
Mycelial media stewardship and it’s containers
On Wednesday I dive into 30. My third decade of being here, here, here. Thank god I’m here. Here, at the altar of my keyboard inside another day of work and swimming inside gratitude with this body that somehow learned how to breathe underwater.
Somehow I carved out breath inside the wake1. And some days I get all esoteric about it, I invoke divine will and say something completely abstract. Today that doesn’t feel right, today I feel like naming. In September, I have plans to go on a writer’s retreat in Northern California to start writing a book naming all the reasons and ways I was able to carve out breath inside the wake as a black girl who grew up online. But today I’ll talk about the house in Dawn, VA that became my oxygen mask in 2021. A house once owned by my Grand Uncle Kay that I now rent from his oldest sister, my Grand Aunt Harriet. A house surrounded by people and plants who know your name only because they know your mama’s name and her mama’s name and their mama’s name. A house held by trees and facing land that my great grandfather farmed to feed generations, land my great grandmother tended to, bending time with beauty through her flower garden. Tucked in between the ancestral lands of the Mattaponi and Youghtanund, this land has been “owned” by my family for four generations and worked by my family since the beginning of Virginia’s slave trade. The way this haunted humus is healing me is a reality I’m still working out. A reality inviting me to slow down and take notes inside The Classroom of the forest — what lessons are here that will allow me to carve out breath inside my creative practice?
When I think about the practice I am most committed to, the practice that feels the most pleasurable, sustainable, transportable and emergent, I think about my writing practice. It’s the practice that keeps me stretchy, accountable and curious. It satisfies the parts of me that longs for improvisation and craves systems. Like my house, my writing practice is also how I carve out breath inside the wake. When reflecting on the last decade of my creative practice there was so, so, so much energy devoted to the birthing of an idea — the labor it took to get it from head and heart and into our material reality. This looked like hours, days, weeks, months of photoshoots and drafting book layouts for the magazine I created in 2015 uplifting the art, politics, and culture in the DC metro area or designing, sewing and fulfilling orders for the clothing line I started in 2017, or hosting a series of community events for my fashion start-up I created on my college campus in 2013 where folks could swap their used clothes for a virtual currency unique to the platform. Entrepreneurship has been a core part of my creative practice for a decade and if I study closely I notice all of the energy and attention I put into the launching of an idea oftentimes left zero breath for the stewardship of the idea.
On Wednesday I dive into 30. My third decade of being here, here, here. Thank god I’m here. Here, inside the creative practice of my dreams — inside the private practice of leather painting, clay carving and homemaking and the public practice of writing and teaching at Seeda School — where I care more about stewardship than the big reveal. How will I spend the next decade showing up and stewarding these ideas? It’s impossible to know for sure but I’m confident it will have something to do with writing. Last week’s newsletter was about the life-saving educational media that we create which can so often be confused for “content”. No, the engaged pedagogy we’re practicing in our educational media centers imagination, mutual aid and care. To call it “content” flattens it’s intention and undermines it’s liberatory possibility. When I think about the next decade of my creative practice and how I imagine making room for my breath — I want to continue to move away from content creation and launches and move toward mycelial media and stewardship where my writing practice is the mother tree2.
Experimenting with my public creative practice as an ecosystem, this is how I am currently showing up:
I publish a weekly newsletter.
I publish a podcast reading that weekly newsletter.
I publish a video of me reading that newsletter (which also doubles as the podcast audio).
Thank you for subscribing to this newsletter. I want to also invite you to subscribe to both our podcast and brand new YouTube channel. These days I am thinking less about generating and sharing new ideas and more about how I can sustainably continue tending to the same central idea: how black feminism might inform our freedom dreams. I hope you’ll join me in this mycelial media experiment where I steward the ecosystem of my creative practice through a black feminist commitment to honoring the pace of my body, the value of my pleasure, and the shape of my breath. Thank god I’m here.
“If, as I have so far suggested, we think the metaphor of the wake in the entirety of its meanings (the keeping watch with the dead, the path of a ship, a consequence of something, in the line of flight and/or sight, awakening, and consciousness) and we join the wake with work in order that we might make the wake and wake work our analytic, we might continue to imagine new ways to live in the wake of slavery, in slavery’s afterlives, to survive (and more) the afterlife of property. In short, I mean wake work to be a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives. With that analytic we might imagine otherwise from what we know now in the wake of slavery.” — Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, pg. 17-18
See Finding the Mother Tree | Suzanne Simard on YouTube about the book with the same name and author.